Accounting Jokes

How many accounting jokes are there? Probably move than we need, but I heard one yesterday from our Finance professor. Like all our professors, the Finance prof was lampooning his peers in other departments and used the joke to diminish the value of other disciplines.

Here goes.

Two Finance professors were floating over a university campus, lost and riding in a hot air balloon.

They spotted a man walking on the quadrangle below, and asked him, "Can you tell us where we are?"

The man answered, "You are in a hot air balloon."

The second finance professor m the balloon looked at the other and said, "Must be an Accountant."

"How do you know?" asked the other.

"He gave us information that was factually correct, but absolutely useless."

Another One Down

I'm done with Management Accounting. Because of a scheduling snafu, I won't be around next Friday when the final was scheduled, so I took it yesterday, a week early. It was actually much better that way-- I used this past week for disciplined study and I felt ready Friday morning to take the exam. Had I taken it with everyone else next Friday, I would have just pushed my studying back one week and not started until tomorrow anyway.

I also got to take the exam alone in a big conference room, so I could look outside big windows, spread out on a big conference table, and most importantly, I could talk to myself during the exam ("Now, does that make sense?"-- yes I talk to myself quite often).

We were allocated four hours for the exam and I completed it in two and a half hours. It was an excellent mental exercise but it's obvious how much I've adjusted to preparing for these types of exercises since starting class. I'm happy to see that my mind is at least a little sharper than it was in August.

So, another class down. That's five graduate courses completed-- who would have guessed I'd be able to say that? I feel good about the accomplishment and I really feel I'm hitting my stride with the program: less stressed about every week's assignments, better able to absorb material and call out the key points, and better able to take tests.

Most importantly, I'm starting to see that, contrary to the self-image I've had since high school, I may not suck at math. My two favorite classes have been math-related: statistics and management accounting. What's up with that? Going into the program, I would have expected the touchy-feely classes (like organizational behavior or marketing) to be my favorites, but I'm really liking the math challenges. Of course it all takes good teachers, and I've had math from some bad teachers too (like financial accounting last semester) so clearly it's a mix. Still, it's odd to find myself actually looking forward to engaging in a math exercise.

Finally Catching Up

It was hard last week, being out of the country on vacation and not completing all the reading and practice problems I had intended to complete. Coming back this week has been harder than anticipated, and I've essentially had to complete two weeks of work in four days-- plus I've had to study for the one-hour quiz we just took.

At some point Thursday night, I finally started to believe the Accounting world wasn't in fact coming to an end, and last night I really hit my stride. Walking into the quiz this morning, I felt I had picked the right things to study, and the quiz was time-consuming but I felt I knew the model into which to plug the numbers. We'll see how accurate my calculations were (we weren't allowed to use Excel for this quiz, which was a undesirable throwback to circa 1987 manual calculations), but it feels good to finally have all of this "click".

Fear

We're well into our second semester now, and we have a new set of professors (two classes) and we're all getting used to each other's styles and approaches. As expected, Managerial Accounting appears to be the hardest of the two classes, the one you can expect to give the most heartburn. Why does Accounting need to be so evil?

One thing that's interesting to watch has been the differing teaching approaches taken by our two accounting professors (Financial Accounting last semester and Managerial Accounting this semester). Last semester the professor used trickery to teach: apparently he felt we would learn best by looking for little tiny discrepancies or tricks in exam questions. All this ever did was teach us we couldn't trust our professor.

This semester, the Managerial Accounting professor is using fear as his prime motivator: he told us on the first day that he took a 10-sided die (10 groups in our class) and a 6-sided die (6 people in each group) and rolled 20 combinations to see who in the class he would randomly call on to answer case questions. He said our entire team would be evaluated based on our responses to these random questions, and we would have to present them when called upon in front of the entire class.

My first thought was, "what is this, eighth grade?" Now we're all just mad, just as mad (but in a different way) as we were with last semester's trickery approach.

What's the point of these misguided motivators? While they might work fine for 19-year-old undergraduates, they're really just noise to us. What's happened is that we now find ourselves focusing obsessively on being ready for every question on every case, and we're not doing much of the reading. So there you go: another totally ineffective tool for learning.

Stunned, and Done

I can't believe it: checking my university grades tonight, I see all my grades from first semester have come through. And I am stunned by my accounting grade-- really, I thought that one was a goner for sure. As it turns out, I placed above average, which is waaaay more than I expected. I completed the first semester with a better GPA than I carried in college, which is proof that maybe I've learned a little since the 1990s. Or maybe it's just that I'm a beneficiary of the university's bell curve policy. Actually, that must be it. Either way, I'm doney-done-done fellas, and I've got solid grades to show for my first quarter of my master's program.

That's about the nicest Christmas gift I could have asked for. Now it's time to crack a whole new set of books and get ready for second semester, which starts in less than three weeks!

Put a Fork in It; It's Done!

Well, it's over. Our team just completed our final presentation for our three professors and our 55 colleagues in class. It still seems like a blur, and my pulse is still coming back down to earth, but initial impressions are that our team did not, in fact, crash and burn. In fact I think we did pretty well. We'll see how the peer evaluations come back, and I'm sure our professors will have more than a few nasty things to say, but hey, we're outta here, baby. Hasta la vista.

The punchline from this day of torment and suffering?

They gave us the books for our second semester classes in a giant black bag, along with our first homework assignment which is due at the start of our first class on January 11. So much for having time to kick back over the holidays-- time to get ramped up on Marketing Strategy and Managerial Accounting.

Just thinking about those classes fills me with dread, but right now it all seems like a lifetime away. For now, it's one more team presentation and then it's on to the bar for a class celebration!

Day of Reckoning

So, here we are, the last day of class in my first semester of graduate school. So many hours of pain, suffering, sleep deprivation, learning, and stretching my mind to get to this place.

Today's schedule: 10 straight presentations for eight hours. My group is #9 out of 10 so people will likely be in a coma by the time our group goes. I feel good about our content and it's wonderful to know that, either way, today it will be over!

Done-y-Done-Done (with Accounting)

Sometimes it's best just to be done, no matter how painful it was or how crappy a final product you end up turning out. Such are my feelings tonight after completing my accounting final-- we had 2 hours to complete the test and I just couldn't work quickly enough to get it done in anywhere close to that time, so much of it will be turned in undone.

How do I feel about this? On one hand, this is the first time I've turned in an incomplete test in probably my entire academic career. On the other hand, I heard one guy in our class actually handed in his midterm exam BLANK, so I guess I could have done less on this final than I did. In the end I gave it a solid two hours, and I produced some good work, but no additional amount of studying, time spent on the exam, or acts of God were going to get me through that mess with much better than I ended up doing. And you know what, I'm OK with that.

Mostly I am just exhilarated to be done with accounting. All of my classwork is now officially complete. Just one more "rock" to climb: our final team presentation on Saturday. That will be a breeze compared to the Hell that was accounting. I say it again: why anyone chooses this profession of their own free will is completely beyond me.

Salvation

Remember when you were a kid in school, and you went to bed the night before a forecasted snowstorm hoping really hard that school would be canceled in the morning if enough snow fell? Some mornings you woke up and, sure enough, there was a ton of snow and school was canceled; just as often, you'd wake up to find the storm had missed your town and you'd trudge off to school.

Today there was a 6-10" snowstorm forecast to hit Minneapolis, and I was hoping against all hope it would be enough to forestall my accounting final. In the morning school still hadn't been canceled, so I drove to school and we had our first class. The snow began to fall right before lunch, and our accounting professor came into our other class and made a stunning announcement: in consideration of the weather, the final would now be a take-home test and it wouldn't be due for another two weeks! Amen, we all said, and the day was altered. Suddenly we could all breathe again.

I'm not going to wait two weeks to do the test-- I'm still stressing about it and I want the pain and suffering to end as quickly as possible. But it was so wonderful not to have to take that damn test today. I came home early and had a fantastic day with my family, enjoying the snow which in the end did actually turn out to be about 8".

All in all, a great day. And hard to believe we are officially finished with all our classes as of today. Just the final group presentations in two weeks, and we're done with the first 25% of our battle.

Time to Pay

Here I am, the classwork from my first semester in my MBA curriculum all but done. It's almost midnight, which means I'm just about 12 hours away from perhaps the most dreaded exercise of the entire semester: our in-class final for Accounting. It's worth 20% of our grade, and all of us are predicting mass failure. The biggest surprise this semester has been that Accounting was much less enjoyable and much more difficult than Stats-- going into the semester, I had assumed the opposite would be true. In the end, I really enjoyed Stats and learned a lot, but Accounting has been sheer punishment at every turn.

Much of this is due to the fact that accounting is, as a general profession, torturous. Why anyone goes into this field voluntarily, I'll never know. They clearly possess a mindset I'll never grasp. I think it takes a certain--maybe a sick--mind to actually enjoy accounting. All semester I've struggled through quizzes that make me more angry than learned, more frustrated than eager to learn. Maybe that motivation works for undergraduates, but for people at my stage of life, it just makes me want to smack the professor.

Today in class, the professor said he assumed we'd all spent 10-15 hours studying for tomorrow's final. That sounds like something an undergrad might have time to do, but I gotta tell you, I sure as hell don't. So I gave studying a shot tonight, reviewing the book and trying some cash flow statement construction, and I'll study bonds and shareholder's equity for another 30 minutes tomorrow, but more than that I just can't do. I've long since ceased enjoying the class, and I'm mad as hell about having to take a traditional in-class final tomorrow, so at this point I'm just like "bring it on, pal."

The question is: will I be mentally prepared to face the music tomorrow? Will I be able to confront an exam I likely will not finish, and be ok walking out once time expires? It's something I would have lost sleep over in college, but at this point, life is way more important than this little Accounting class.

B's are......Bokay?

Well, time to put your money where your mouth is. All along I've been telling myself I'm not in this MBA program for grades-- I'm in it for the degree and the experience. Well, I seem to be stuck writhing beneath the thumb of a devious Accounting professor who thinks trickery is more important than actual learning, so after taking the midterm 2 of 2 allotted times, my highest score is an 83.3%. Pretty good, given the hell the professor put us through.

Now, seriously facing a "B" in this class, I need to remember what I've been saying to myself all along: that I'm not in this program for the grades. In all things, I try to use the 10-year test: in 10 years, will really matter? My Accounting midterm score won't matter, the Accounting class itself won't matter, none of my grades will matter (assuming I still graduate), and even the MBA itself will only matter in the most indirect of senses. So why sweat the small stuff?

Thankfully, as with most things these days, I'm almost too tired to care.

Entering Hell

Remember about how I've said when you feel peaceful and like you're caught up with your classwork, it usually means you've forgotten something or that you're not working as far ahead as you need to be? I'm in that very situation now-- it's been weeks since I used the part of my brain dedicated to my Accounting class, and now that's all coming back to bite me. Although we don't have class again for two weeks, tonight is the official beginning of Accounting Hell Weeks.

Check it out:

1. Take-home final due in four days, covering seven chapters (only six of which I've read as of tonight). Two chances to take the final, each 60 minutes. 30 questions. Immeasurable pain and suffering.
2. Take-home questions from the final. Due November 16. Seems easy, but the questions themselves are impossibly difficult, and wait until you read all the rest of the crap that's due on the 16th and 17th as well.
3. Textbook chapters 8-9, along with homework problems, both due November 16.
4. Textbook chapters 10-11, along with homework problems, both due November 17.

Normally this would be a bone-crushing load, but to add to it, we've also got Organizational Behavior reading and homework to do-- including reading an entire book! And there's also a session of Ops Management, with homework, due that same weekend.

I think I may slip into a coma at 4:30pm on Saturday the 17th, when all this crap is done and handed in. Stay tuned, and please say a prayer for me if you have a little Altar of Accounting anywhere in your home or office.

84

OK, so most of my classes, while they are impossibly difficult and time-consuming, at least take into consideration that we're busy, working professionals with families and lives outside of class. As a result, most of the classes don't have traditional in-class final exams, favoring instead a series of homework, essay, and group project work.

And then there's accounting. This devil of a class is killing me. I thought statistics would be my hardest class; instead, accounting is brutal. The professor seems to take particular delight in requiring us to take not one but TWO exams plus a series of quizzes. In the "old days" of undergraduate education, I'd be OK with this, but in my current situation I'm rebelling. Today I took the first online quiz. Twice (the maximum number of times you could take it). An hour each time. And the best I could do was an 84%. Still pretty good, but not what I was used to producing in college. I'm having to re-invent my concept of an "acceptable" grade in light of the fact that I'm primarily here to get a master's degree, not to get a GPA. Does anybody ask what your MBA GPA was? Maybe if you're applying to work for Goldman Sachs, but I think we all know that's not me, so why should I care? Truth is, I'm too tired to care a whole lot.

What really gets me is that the quiz had a large number of tricky questions, items where it was easy to miss the obvious and/or to fall into a trap. Judging from the personality of the professor, he delights in inflicting this type of pain on his students, but I'm sitting here thinking, "hey, buddy, I'm paying you like $1,000 per session for this class, so can we let go of the need to answer to your crazy level of detail and just focus on testing the fundamentals?"

Maybe this is all some clever little mental experiment for the professor, but in 10 years I don't think much of what I agonized over on the quiz today will really determine whether I'm an insightful business professional or not. And yeah, I'm still pretty pissed that I got an 84.

Stepping off my soapbox now....

The Punchline

As I was driving in to class in the dark this morning, it occurred to me that I was in some way the living punchline of a very cruel joke. Something that ends in "Sitting in an Accounting class that starts at 7:30am...."

I realized this morning that I've crossed a threshold: I'm rediscovering the "student mode" I used in college to get through the experience. I find myself able to subsist on far less sleep than I once was, I don't get alarmed at the prospect of reading 100 pages a night in a textbook, and I'm again able to churn out academic assignments that seem at least moderately well-done.

This is all very encouraging, but the truth is that I just don't have a moment to stop. The work continues coming at such a furious pace that you either keep swimming or you drown. It's actually compelling to a degree-- at least that's what I tell myself when I'm not whimpering in my home office at 2am struggling with yet another homework problem. The reality of day-to-day corporate life is pretty unfulfilling in many respects, but there's nothing that'll get your juices flowing again faster than the raw fear of four graduate-level courses!

Back again

Back again for my second week-- I must be crazy. It's 7am on a Saturday morning and I'm sitting with 65 other people eager (or foolish) enough to give up yet another Saturday to be on the campus of the University of Minnesota for school. Most of us had a rough week, crushed by the volume of homework we needed to have ready for today. I went through several gyrations of "how do I find enough time in the day to do this work?" and instead of pushing it all off to the mythical "after the kids go to bed" time period, instead I'm looking for smaller timeslots during the day when I can make at least a little progress.

Yesterday we had 12 hours of statistics-- that was about as interesting as it sounds. But I was surprised to find myself actually interested quite a bit in what was being presented. One of the reasons I've stayed away from math is because of a cadre of evil math teachers sent to torment me in high school-- this was the prime reason I didn't major in computer science in college. Now, with 16 years of the workforce behind me, I'm taking another run at it. It's amazing how the textbooks have changed since I left college-- they're much more graphical, informal, and segmented than I remember-- much easier to approach. And of course the Internet exists now, so the books have an online component that would have been unimaginable the last time I was in school. It's making everything more interesting.

Today's topic: accounting. (cringe) 12 hours learning the "language of business" as they say. I'm going to need all the caffeine I can get my hands on.